The abandoned subway entrance was three blocks north of her safe house, behind a condemned casino. She found it by smell first-stale water, rust, something rotting sweet underneath. Then she saw the fence, the plywood, the spray paint that said KEEP OUT in letters that had faded to pink.

Jessie stopped at the metal door. It was new, industrial, with a biometric scanner that looked expensive and out of place. She didn't touch it.

"Invitation," a voice said.

She looked up. Two men stood in the shadows beside the door. Suits, cheap, stretched over muscle that came from prison yards, not gyms. The one who'd spoken was bald, with a scar that bisected his eyebrow. Spike. She knew the type. They were the same everywhere.

"Lost my invitation," she said, her voice small, reedy, nothing like her own. She kept her eyes on the ground.

"Then you're lost, period." He stepped closer, into the light, trying to use his size. He was six-two, maybe two-forty. She catalogued him automatically: slow, left-heavy, probably carried a gun in his waistband that he'd never use fast enough. "Beat it, kid. This ain't no place for street trash."

Jessie looked up, just for a second, letting the single bare bulb overhead glint off her glasses. She let her hand tremble as she reached into her pocket. "The Jackal sent me," she whispered, the code phrase old, almost out of use. "He said to ask for Finch. He said Finch owed him."

Spike froze. He exchanged a look with the other guard. The name still had power.

"Wait here." He spoke into a wrist comm, his voice low.

A minute later, the door opened.

A man squeezed through, sweating, his shirt untucked, his face the color of uncooked dough. Mortimer Finch. Jessie knew him from a file she'd read in another life, another name. He ran the western territories. He was careful, greedy, and absolutely terrified of the right people.

He saw her slumped posture, her cheap clothes, her bad haircut. Disgust warred with caution on his face. "You mentioned the Jackal?"

Jessie nodded, not speaking. She held out her right hand, palm up. In the center of her palm, just below the thumb, was a small, faded tattoo, barely visible. A stylized scorpion, its tail a single, sharp line. A marker from a dead network, one only a handful of people would recognize.

Mortimer's eyes widened. He licked his lips. "My apologies. Please, come inside. What can I do for a friend of... an old friend?"

Jessie walked through the door. The air changed immediately, from desert dry to underground damp, from desperation to dangerous opulence. The tunnel opened into a cavern, lights strung like stars, stalls selling everything from weapons to identities to things she didn't want to identify.

People turned to look. They saw Mortimer's posture, the way he scurried beside her, the way his hand kept fluttering toward her elbow without quite touching. They looked away. Fast.

The VIP suite was a shipping container, refurbished, soundproofed. Jessie sat on the leather couch.

"I need a metabolic inhibitor," she said, her voice back to its normal flat tone now that they were alone. "Medical grade. Stasis-7 or equivalent. Not the street trash you sell to addicts. The real thing."

"Yes, yes, of course. I have a new shipment, just arrived, top shelf-"

"And privacy."

"Absolutely. The VIP suite. No one will disturb you."

Mortimer returned with a case, aluminum, medical. He opened it on the table and stepped back, hands raised, not wanting to see what she did with the contents.

Jessie didn't look at him. She was already loading the syringe, finding the vein, pushing the plunger with practiced efficiency.

The cool spread through her arm, into her chest, damping the fire. She closed her eyes and breathed.

For now, she was safe.

The inhibitor was in her pack, wrapped in foam, hidden under a layer of textbooks she'd bought for her cover. Jessie walked through the market, keeping to the shadows, her posture slumped again. Just another desperate person looking for a way out.

She was almost to the side exit when she heard a voice that made her blood run cold.

"-authentic, I swear, my grandmother brought it from Vienna-"

Jessie stopped. She knew that whine, the bluster that couldn't hide the desperation. She turned.

It wasn't Vince. It couldn't be. Not here.

But it was. Three stalls down, he was holding her mother's doll, waving it at a man in a silk shirt who looked bored. How? How had he gotten from a trailer in Ohio to a high-end black market in Vegas? The question was a block of ice in her stomach.

She had to get the doll. It was the only thing left. But she couldn't expose herself. She watched, her mind racing, as the man in the silk shirt reached for his wallet.

Jessie's hand shot out. Not at Vince. At a stack of crates beside his stall, piled high with cheap, counterfeit electronics. A single, calculated push. The top crate tipped, teetered, and then the whole stack went over with a deafening crash of plastic and shattering glass.

Chaos. People yelled. The stall owner screamed. Vince jumped back, dropping the doll to protect his face from flying debris.

It was all the opening she needed.

In the confusion, she moved like a ghost, a stoop-shouldered girl nobody would look at twice. She scooped the doll from the floor, tucked it into her canvas bag, and kept moving, melting back into the panicked crowd.

"Hey!" Vince's voice, shrill with fury. "My doll! That girl! She took my doll! Thief!"

He pointed, but he was pointing into a sea of moving bodies. A few people glanced her way, saw a scared student clutching her bag, and looked past her, searching for a more likely culprit.

But someone else was looking. Not at her, but at the scene.

From a catwalk above the market floor, a man in a tailored suit lowered a pair of binoculars. Julian Adler. He had been scanning the crowd for hours, looking for any anomaly. The sudden, precise toppling of the crates was exactly that. It wasn't random. It was a professional-level distraction.

His eyes swept the area, and he saw her. The girl from the alley. Jessie. The one with the anomalous thermal signature. She was moving away from the chaos with a purpose that contradicted her frightened-student disguise.

He keyed his radio, his voice calm. "Target acquired. Section Gamma, moving toward exit four. She's carrying a new item, a large canvas bag. Mr. Hogan, she's here."

Below, Jessie felt a prickle on the back of her neck. The feeling of being watched. She quickened her pace, heading for the service corridors, the places Mortimer had shown her on the way in.

Behind her, she heard the subtle shift in the market's noise. The tramp of disciplined feet. They were coming.

Jessie didn't run. Running was for prey. She moved with purpose, with angles, using the panicked crowd as cover, sliding between stalls, ducking under hanging tarps.

The main doors at the far end of the cavern burst open. Not exploded. Worse. Opened with absolute control, absolute authority. Men in black poured through, weapons up. Behind them, a man in a coat that cost more than Vince's entire life.

Bryce Hogan. His left arm was in a sling, but his eyes were sharp, scanning the crowd.

Jessie felt her heart stutter. She felt her skin go cold, then hot, the inhibitor fighting a losing battle against adrenaline.

She turned a corner, found a corridor, narrow, lined with storage containers. Dead end. Or-

There. A ladder, bolted to the wall, leading up to a catwalk. She climbed, fast, silent, her boots finding the rungs without looking.

She reached the top and moved along the catwalk, crouching, staying low. Below, she saw Bryce enter the corridor. He wasn't looking around randomly. He was following precise instructions from the man on the catwalk opposite her, the one with the binoculars. Julian.

She didn't wait. She found the stairs at the end of the catwalk, took them down, emerged into a different section of the market. Quieter. Industrial. Shipping containers stacked like building blocks, creating a maze of shadows and dead ends.

She moved into it. She needed to get out. She needed to-

"Stop."

The voice was behind her. Close. Ten meters, maybe less.

Jessie turned.

Bryce Hogan stood at the entrance to the container maze, his coat open, his good hand resting on a gun at his waist. His face was pale in the fluorescent light, his eyes dark holes. "I know it's you," he said. "The girl in the alley. The one who creates chaos."

Jessie said nothing. She was a scared student. She let her hand drift toward her bag, as if to clutch it for comfort. Inside, her fingers found the hilt of her knife.

"You're a very good actress," he continued, walking forward, slow, deliberate. "But the thermal scans don't lie. And neither does a perfectly executed distraction. Now, you're going to tell me what you did to me in those woods."

He was ten meters away. Eight. Six.

Jessie was boxed in.

Bryce stopped five meters away. He drew his gun. "Take off the glasses," he said. "Let me see your face."

Jessie smiled. A small, sad, terrified smile.

Then she moved.

She went up, not forward. Her foot found the edge of a container, pushed off, her body unfolding into the air. Bryce's gun came up, tracking, but she was already above his line of fire, dropping down behind him, her knife in her hand.

He turned. Fast. Faster than she expected for a man with one arm in a sling. His good arm came up, blocking her strike, the blade skimming along his forearm, cutting fabric, finding flesh. He didn't flinch. He grabbed her wrist, his fingers like iron, and pulled her into him.

Close. Too close. The moment his skin touched hers, a jolt went through him. He had braced for the wave of revulsion that always came with touching someone unclean, someone from the street. It didn't come. Her skin was hot, shockingly so, but... clean. The thought was a flicker of lightning in the storm of the fight, a baffling detail that his mind filed away even as his body reacted. He could smell his own blood, copper on the air. He could feel her breath on his cheek.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

Jessie answered with her knee, driving up into his stomach. He twisted, taking the blow on his hip, his grip never loosening. She felt her arm bend, her shoulder strain, and she moved with it, letting him pull her off-balance, using the momentum to spin behind him.

Her free hand found his neck. Her fingers pressed into the carotid, feeling for the pressure point that would drop him.

He elbowed her. Hard. With his injured arm. The pain must have been immense, but he drove it back into her ribs, right side. She felt something give, a sharp crack, pain like lightning. She gasped, her grip loosening, and he threw her off.

She hit a container, back first, the air leaving her lungs. She slid down, her vision sparking.

Bryce was advancing, gun raised. "Don't move."

Jessie moved.

She threw her knife. Not at him-past him, into the shadows, where it clanged against metal. He flinched, instinct, his eyes tracking the sound for half a second.

Half a second was enough.

She was on him, inside his guard, her palm striking his nose, her knee finding his thigh. He grunted, stumbled, and she was past him, running, her ribs screaming with every step.

"Stop!" he shouted.

She didn't stop. She found the corridor she'd seen earlier, the one that led to the maintenance tunnels. She ran. Behind her, she heard his men closing in. She needed distance.

Her hand found her belt. The last smoke grenade. She pulled the pin and dropped it behind her.

White smoke exploded, filling the corridor. She heard coughing, cursing, Bryce's voice rising above the rest: "Find her! I want her found!"

She kept running, up a ladder, through a hatch, into the night air of Las Vegas.